Spotify Gets Hooked Up With Some Sweet Speakers

Spotify’s main selling point is that subscribers can take just about any song in the world with them, via their mobile phones.

But once those folks get back to their house, it might be nice to hear that same music on some decent speakers. So the company is announcing “Spotify Connect,” which amounts to a series of partnerships with home-stereo makers, which makes it easy to sling the service from a phone to Wi-Fi-connected stereo systems.

Spotify already has a partnership with Sonos, the high-end digital home-audio company. This deal is different in some respects, but similar in general terms, and includes brands like Bang & Olufsen, Denon, Pioneer and Yamaha (you’re out of luck for now, Radio Raheem). The only details worth noting for now:

“Spotify Connect” will only be available to Spotify’s six million paid subscribers. So, if you’re getting Spotify for free, with ads, this won’t do you any good.

For now, the service will only work with iPhones and iPads; Android and desktop connections should work down the road.

The only thing that matters here, big-picture-wise, is that what this really does is provide Spotify with another marketing push. Each of its home-audio partners will slap a Spotify logo on their packaging, in the same way that most devices that hook up with Pandora also flag that connection.

And that seems to have worked pretty well for Pandora, which is now available on more than 760 gadgets and has more than 71 million active users. Spotify is big — at last count, it had 24 million active users — but it wants to get a lot bigger, so it will need more deals like this one.
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